Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 that the Jew is a prince, regardless of circumstances—that Jewish dignity does not depend on the world’s recognition and that Jewish sovereignty does not require the world’s permission. A century later, the State of Israel proves his point.
In January 1948, with independence weeks away and war with five Arab armies inevitable, Israeli founding father (and several months later, its first prime minister) David Ben-Gurion sent Golda Meir (who eventually went on to become prime minister herself) to the United States to raise funds. She arrived in New York with $10 in her purse. Officials hoped that she might secure $7 million or $8 million from the American Jewish community.
She aimed for $25 million.
Meir returned to Israel with $50 million after speaking in Chicago and touring 19 cities—without notes, without preparation, carrying nothing but the moral weight of what was about to happen. Ben-Gurion later wrote: “Someday when history will be written, it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible.”
The state she helped finance was born fighting. It had no army, no recognized borders, no oil, no established industry, and a population of Holocaust survivors and refugees who had arrived with nothing and spoke an array of different languages. The foreign currency reserves of the new Bank of Israel stood at $11,000. The country’s GDP in 1948 was $1.3 billion.
Seventy-seven years later, Israel’s GDP per capita stands at $54,177—higher than the United Kingdom, higher than Japan, higher than France. Its total GDP has grown from $1.3 billion at its founding to more than $500 billion—a 38,000% increase from a country that spent every decade of its existence at war. It fought in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2023.
It has never had a decade of peace. It has never stopped building.
Israel has the highest rate of startups per capita of any nation on earth. Its technology sector generated $58.8 billion in exits in 2025 alone—a 340% increase from the year before. Google acquired the Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz for $32 billion in 2025, the largest acquisition in Israeli tech history. The country has produced 93 unicorns from a population of 9.3 million people. It ranks 14th in the Global Innovation Index. Its high-tech sector now represents 18% of GDP and 54% of total exports. It spends 4.9% of GDP on research and development, among the highest of any nation on earth.
Israel has more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any country outside the United States and China. More than 400 multinational corporations—Google, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Meta, NVIDIA—have established R&D centers in the Jewish state. Not out of charity, but because the talent is unmatched. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever opened his research lab in Tel Aviv in 2024. The country produces more scientific publications per capita than any other nation.
The founding population of Israel is worth sitting with. The country doubled its population in four years after independence—not with wealthy investors or educated professionals, but with Holocaust survivors from displaced persons camps across Germany, Austria and Italy. These were people who had spent years in hiding or in concentration camps, who had lost their families, their communities and their property. Also filling the ranks were refugees expelled from Arab countries—Jews forced out of Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Libya and Syria—often arriving with nothing after their assets were seized.
The early years were genuinely hard. Food was rationed. The country had to build every hospital, every road, every military unit, every institution from nothing while simultaneously fighting for survival. Investment as a share of GDP ran at 44% in 1950 because there was simply nothing yet to invest in. The exports-to-imports gap ran above 20% of GDP. Israel was, by any conventional measure, economically unviable at birth.
What they built from that position is not a recovery story; there is no precedent for it in modern history.
Consider it directly. The United Kingdom—67 million people, centuries of accumulated capital, the legal and financial infrastructure of a former global empire, natural resources, established trade relationships, the world’s reserve currency for most of the 20th century—has a GDP per capita of approximately $48,000.
Israel—9.3 million people, 78 years old, built from nothing, blockaded the day it was founded, absorbing mass refugee populations across every decade, fighting a war with Iran as recently as 2025—has a GDP per capita of $54,177.
The nation that the world’s chancelleries said could not survive has a higher standard of living per person than the country whose navy tried to stop Holocaust survivors from reaching its shores. The people who were told that they had no right to a state have built a better one, by measurable economic standards, than most of the nations that voted against them.
The argument against Israel’s existence has never engaged with this data.
The case for delegitimization—in U.N. resolutions, in campus protest movements, in the BDS campaign, in the platforms of politicians who pledge to arrest its prime minister—rests on a moral framework that refuses to acknowledge what the Jewish state actually is: the most successful refugee state in human history, built by a people who had just lost one-third of their global population to industrial genocide, who arrived with nothing and who were told by the world that they had come to the wrong place.
They did this while absorbing waves of refugees that would have broken the economies of larger and wealthier nations. They did it exactly the way Jabotinsky said they would—not by asking permission, not by accommodating those who sought their destruction, but by building something undeniable and defending it with everything they had.
Jabotinsky wrote that “even in distress, the Jew is a prince—no matter if a slave or a tramp, you were created the son of kings, crowned with the diadem of David.” He wrote that in 1923, before the Holocaust, before the state, before any of the numbers above existed. He was describing a philosophical conviction, not an empirical prediction.
The empirical prediction came true anyway. The most persecuted people in history built the most successful state of the modern era—from $11,000 in national reserves, from displaced persons camps, from nothing—in 78 years. The world keeps asking them to apologize for it.
History answers for itself.
